e-learning multimedia applications: towards an engineering of … · e-learning multimedia...

Int. J. of Computers, Communications & Control, ISSN 1841-9836, E-ISSN 1841-9844Vol. III (2008), No. 2, pp. 116-124

E-learning multimedia applications:Towards an engineering of content creation

Maria Dolores Afonso Suarez, Cayetano Guerra Artal, Francisco Mario Tejera Hernandez

Abstract: In the same manner that e-learning applications are becoming increas-ingly important at the university, there are still some critical questions that should besolved with the objective of making use of the potential offered by current Web Tech-nologies. The creation of contents that are able of capturing the attention of interestof the students and their disposal in an appropriate way constitute the main purposeof this work. The teaching content engineering expounded shows the different stagesthat should form part of the process. A development team, composed of differentprofessional profiles, will work together with the lecturers of the subject to whichthe contents are been created, i.e. multimedia videos and interactive applications.This process should be developed according to a methodology that assure the use ofappropriate resources, all that tasks -suitable of being- should be modularized andfactorized. This paper presents the acquired experience in the development and useof multimedia contents for e-learning applications, created for some of the subjectsof the degree in computer science engineering. The deliveries of these contents makeuse of Internet and video streaming techniques. The result of the work shows thestudents satisfaction, including their comments.Keywords: Teaching content engineering, Didactic objectives, Active learning, Pas-sive learning.

1 Introduction

During recent years University Education has experienced an important progress with respect to theresources used for lecturing. Techniques have changed from traditional blackboard methods to the useof projector transparencies (slices) and, later on, the use of video projector and PowerPoint to present thecontent of the lessons. Nowadays, the use of these technologies has become more common. As far ascontent availability for the student is concerned, it has passed from traditional notes taken in classrooms,books and photocopies to digital format of books or notes taken in classrooms, which are available inthe subject’s web page. In fact, the universities use to place courses on the web focusing on informationdelivery rather than learning. The proposal of European Higher Education Area provides the frameworkto take an important step forward in techniques used in lectures and in the methodology used to createthem. For this reason, new methodological approaches are introduced in order to value an active learning[1] as opposed to a traditional passive learning. To value the effort that students should make in orderto assimilate knowledge and not only consider the number of hours of attendance to classes. The use ofe-learning techniques makes this easier; its wide range of application allows increasing education qualityand delivery of information.

2 E-learning in EHEA

The European Higher Education Area proposes the setting up of a convergence process of educationalmaterial in Europe. New methodological approaches are introduced in order to value an active learningas opposed to a traditional passive learning. To value the effort that students should make in order toassimilate knowledge and not only consider the number of hours of attendance to classes. All this ismade easier by using an e-learning [2] approach, whose extensive work field, in all range of subjects,

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E-learning multimedia applications:Towards an engineering of content creation 117

allows the quality of education and its availability to increase [3]. The creation of multimedia contentsfor e-learning could be developed together with other European Universities, and its use could be sharedwithin the same knowledge areas. This allows a new common line of work to be opened. It will bepossible to promote European cooperation to guarantee the quality of higher education using comparablemethodologies and criteria.

3 Teaching content engineering

We understand for that concept the whole methodological corpus that allows inserting development e-learning technologies in the production of didactic solutions with appropriate invests in production time,resources and person/hour. In this manner, the creation of contents will be developed in a systematic way,planning the process and using adequate techniques. The integration of these techniques and the extentof the teaching material development project require a multidisciplinary team. This multidisciplinaryteam composed of a group of different professional profiles will carry out different tasks using a widevariety of technologies. These tasks will come together in order to create a production line to maximizeresults. The improvement of productivity and quality in teaching content creation will constitute themain objective of this engineering [4]. The proposed engineering of teaching content is carried out bymeans of a methodology, which divides the multimedia production process into phases and assigns tasksto each member of this professional development team. All these different phases include research onsuitability of the content for e-learning, a previous analysis to select multimedia techniques to apply,the development of the contents based on the project design and, finally, the maintenance. With respectto the multidisciplinary team, it will be composed of a project manager, programmers, designers, andmultimedia experts, as well as the lecturers of each subject.

4 Methodology

The obtaining of an optimum workflow [5] and the use of resources by the different production tasksis the main purpose of the proposed methodology. For that, we define different production phases.

4.1 Suitability of the content for e-learning

To create multimedia material for subjects using e-learning techniques means a considerable resourceinvestment. Therefore, some factors, which help to make a decision about its profitability, should be takeninto consideration. In this first phase a study on the suitability is made in accordance with the factorsbelow:

The content validity. The period of time in which teaching contents do not need to be updated.

The number of students who attend classroom training. This factor takes into consideration thenumber of resources used in their learning.

The modularity and reusability of independently operable units, which are part of the total structurefor creating more contents.

4.2 Contents analysis

The creation of multimedia contents is carried out through the division of teaching contents in didac-tic objectives. In this phase the modularization of content takes place. The extraction of the lecturers’knowledge will be necessary for the selection and proposal of different multimedia didactic elements,

118 Maria Dolores Afonso Suarez, Cayetano Guerra Artal, Francisco Mario Tejera Hernandez

which will constitute part of these multimedia didactic units. It is recommendable to follow a method-ology belonging to knowledge engineering, where the knowledge is produced according to the lecturer’ssubject specific knowledge, and contains the knowledge and analytical skills of one or more humanexperts. To achieve this aim, the tasks below are introduced:

Meetings with the lecturers. In these meetings lecturers expound the teaching objectives of the subject,explain the lesson content and the current way to portray the contents to the students.

The selection of lessons for multimedia format. The project manager, together with the lecturers,carries out the selection of lessons for which multimedia teaching content will be created

Proposal and techniques selection [6]. According to the techniques selected, and the modules reposi-tory, the project manager makes a proposal to the lecturers.

4.3 Development

Starting from the analysis of the previous phase, a formal design is carried out, this formal design willidentify the activities and work planning that will be done under the supervision of the project manager[7]. Therefore, this phase is structured as shown below:

Formal design includes all the multimedia didactic elements to be used. In accordance with this design,both human and material resources are managed. It is a process of problem solving and planningfor reaching the objectives of the project.

Development of interactive applications will follow a development methodology belonging to softwareengineering.

Creation of videos, for which the work will be divided into: script writing, recordings, postproductionand codification [8].

On-line disposition of multimedia contents, becoming, this way, accessible for the students.

In the process the creativity of the development team is considered fundamental.

4.4 Maintenance

Once the project is finished, it is difficult to assure that it will work properly unless it is tested. Inorder to realize a high quality solution, testing throughout each phase of the process is proposed. Theproject team should be involved in the maintenance phase. They are expected to work on their knownissues and prepare for a new release of the created material. In order to detect defects and deficiencies inthe multimedia material, some tasks are introduced:

Interviews with lecturers and students, to know first hand how they feel about this new content touse, in various aspects: accessibility, manage, design.

Questionnaires, for recover statistics results about all the aspects to be evaluated.

Comparison of academic results, where an evaluation report will be made, and academic results willbe compared with those of other groups of students that have made use of traditional learningmethodologies.

All these tasks will help to obtain a constructive feedback and to enhance and optimize this multimediamaterial and its different aspects evaluated. A thorough study of time and staff required for project de-velopment will take us to a suitable planning and this to an appropriate economic investment. Therefore,cost and resources affect directly in the amortization of the investment made for the creation of contents.


5 Resources

Among the means that will be used to carry out this technology we find both human and materialresources. The competences of the multidisciplinary team are defined by different profiles:

Lecturers, whose main tasks include the structure of the subject program, script writing, and the pro-posal and collective agreement with the project manager on the multimedia didactic units.

Project manager, who advises lecturers, coordinates efforts of the development team and assigns tasksaccording to the planning made.

Designers, which will carry out tasks of graphic design, user interfaces development, and 2D - 3Delements creation.

Analysts/programmers, to analyze and develop software application and programs.

Multimedia technicians, in charge of recording, editing, and postproduction.

Regarding to material resources, these are comprised of the multimedia recording studio and thelaboratory room for development of software applications and editing of contents. The workstations ofthe editing room in the laboratory are fully equipped with the necessary computer material for creatingand editing audiovisual content. Figure 1.

Figure 1: On the left we can observe the record Studio used for the recording of lessons. On the rightworkstation of the editing room.

6 Other methodologies

There are different strategies for the creation of teaching content for e-learning. These approachesoften use a similar set of stages or phases for content development. Among them we find the "waterfallphilosophy" characterized by the use of a number of phases strictly ordered in such a way that eachphase begins once the previous one is finished; and the "evolutionary philosophy" or "based in proto-types", characterized by considering since the beginning that, although the project start out with a set ofrequirements, will arise changes in these requirements as the project is developed. However, the method-ological proposal made in this work for an e-learning content engineering focuses on lecturing and thismeans a set of differences, related below:

Scope. Traditional methodologies are directed, generally, towards content development for corporatee-learning. The proposed methodology is focused on content development for lecturing.


Contents modularity. In each knowledge area to create independently operable units intended forreuse in the same or a different one is proposed. This means the use of a knowledge area thoroughanalysis in order to make these operable units relocation possible when creating new teachingprograms.

Extend of involvement. Lecturers should be part of the work team that will create multimedia contentsfor e-learning, should be involved not only in didactic advises tasks, according to the teachingobjectives of the subject, but also should take part in the conception of the whole set of toolsproposed by the project manager.

Resources. The wide variety and quantity of multimedia resources used are essential in the proposedmethodology for e-learning content creation. Multimedia technology and the development of in-teractive applications provide suitable capabilities to develop quality contents at the universitylevel.

7 Lecturing experiences

For the evaluation of e-learning techniques in lecture content, some subjects have been selected.Specifically, the subjects correspond to bachelor and graduate degrees on "Computer Science Engineer-ing", Multimedia and Automaton Theory and Formal Languages II. Specially, the subject of Multime-dia has the particular feature of covering two fundamental aspects in the teaching of computer scienceknowledge. On the one hand, we find purely theoretical and mathematical content which supports audiocompression, image and video technologies. On the other, we find content that makes reference to theuse of multimedia tools and web programming languages. In particular, the subject of Multimedia hasa teaching timetable of 30 theoretical hours (twice a week), using traditional classrooms, and other 30hours of practical lessons in the laboratory. The prepared material embraces half the timetable in theclassroom. The content generated for Automaton Theory and Formal Languages II corresponds to thepractical exercises of the subject. As lecturers can now count on this new multimedia teaching material,the methodology, which has been followed till now in Multimedia, has changed substantially. Firstly, thestudents still have the same number of learning hours; however, they receive some lessons by means ofvideo in a dedicated server. This means that they receive, weekly, one hour in the classroom and anotherone through video streaming. This new material allows traditional lessons to be divided into two groups.In this way the lesson in the classroom is repeated and the student attends the most convenient classes.Therefore, not only do they not miss the opportunity to ask the lecturer doubts, but also the number ofstudents is reduced, allowing a more personalized treatment. With respect to Automaton Theory andFormal Languages II, the prepared material only provides support to the personal training of the student.The results of this experience have been very positive. Students have valuated unanimously this newteaching model as completely recommendable. Even, the students have taken part in the improvementof the material contributing with their own ideas, needs, and wishes, like including random questionsin order to implement interactivity [9]. From the valuation questionnaire issues below are recovered:Multimedia videos are very appreciated. No comments were made about accessibility or reproductiondifficulties or even misunderstanding. Although students think it is necessary: the inclusion of subject’scontent in a pdf format file and an index to facilitate access directly to each unit of the lesson. And justonly one student pointed out that the teacher should propose more practical material in the classroom.The valuation questionnaire results are represented in the Table 1.

As we can observe, percentage for the last one question is quite good. Figure 2.With respect to the academic efficiency revealed in the assessments, we should say that the percentage

of success in the exams remains constant if we compare with the results of past years where lessons weretaught in a traditional way. However, a particular fact, which is known by all lecturers when the exams’


Table 1: Results from bachelor and graduate degrees on "Computer Science Engineering"

Figure 2: Graphical representation for general assessment. Results from bachelor and graduate degreeson "Computer Science Engineering"


dates come close, should be commented. In the previous weeks to exam dates the students come morefrequently, and in many cases only on those dates, to the tutorials. It is remarkable that during thisteaching experience there have been practically no consultations in tutorials in all the academic year, noteven on dates coming up to the exams.

8 Future research

The acquired experience in the development of multimedia contents for e-learning applications showsthat this emergent task should be tackled through the use of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable ap-proach to the development, manage and maintenance of this teaching content material. In the near future,we will test the process of development of a new project from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Ca-naria. This project involves the creation of multimedia material for subjects of three different areas: thetechnical area, the health care science area, and the human, society and legal area. The election of thesubjects has been made according to the factors expounded in the phase of suitability of the subject. It hasbeen preferential for the technical department to choose subjects of the first courses of various degreeswith similar contents, what implies a considerable number of lessons in common. So that, there will besubjects with the 85 or 90 per cent of their content delivered with multimedia material, which is moreprofitable than having only one or two subjects with the 100 per cent of the content delivered with thisnew material. The subject is named mathematics in some degrees and calculus in other ones. Somethingsimilar has happened in the other two knowledge areas: in the health care science area anatomy has beenchosen, this is a subject of the first course of "Medical Degree" with a huge number of students. Forthe human, society and legal area has been chosen constitutional law, which corresponds to two differ-ent degrees: "Law" and "Economics and Business Sciences", degrees with a large number of studentsin the first courses too. In this way, we will delve into each phase of this new engineering focusing onimproving the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the development of multimedia contents for e-learningin these subjects selected.

9 Conclusions

New information technologies and e-learning will be indispensable tools in lecturing in the near fu-ture. The increasing bandwidth available for Internet connection and multimedia capacities found incurrent computers allow them to be used as a completely valid way for teaching. However, the lackof multimedia content production is a very important cause that limits an e-learning widespread. Thecreation of large-scale teaching content for lecturing needs a production methodology to assure the op-timization of resources and, therefore, a reduction in costs. This work intends to contribute with themethodological lines applied in the production of multimedia teaching content for lecturing. New teach-ing methodologies require new teaching aims; the role of lecturers in the new educational process shouldbe restated in the whole educational process. Lecturers should reduce the time dedicated to teachinglessons using traditional blackboard methods. This activity could be mainly, replaced by e-learning tech-niques. Lecturers could dedicate time to activities that offer a better quality in teaching, transmittingmotivation about the subject being studied and directing the students in their studies [10]. The future ofteaching in the European society should see an improvement in the quality of education, its availability,and a lower cost for students as well as for educative organizations.

10 Acknowledgment

We wish to thank the programm committee of ICVL 2007 that recommended the publication of anextended version of this paper.


Bibliography

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Maria Dolores Afonso Suarez, Cayetano Guerra ArtalFrancisco Mario Hernandez Tejera

Instituto Universitario de Sistemas Inteligentes yAplicaciones Numericas en Ingenieria IUSIANI

Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran CanariaDepartamento de Informatica y Sistemas

Edif. de Informatica y Matematicas. Campus Universitario de Tafira. 35017. Las Palmas. Spain.E-mail: [email protected], [email protected]

[email protected]

Received: November 30, 2007


Maria Dolores Afonso Suarez, graduated at the University ofLas Palmas de Gran Canaria in Computer Science. She hasworked in private enterprises developing software and as associ-ated professor at the Computer Science and Systems Departmentof the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Her main re-search fields are Multimedia and e-Learning.

Cayetano Guerra Artal, graduated at the University of Las Pal-mas de Gran Canaria in Computer Science. He has been teachingMultimedia for seven years at the Computer Science and SystemsDepartment of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.He received his Ph.D. in Computer Vision. His main researchfields are Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, Multimedia ande-Learning.

Francisco Mario Hernandez Tejera graduated in Electrical En-gineering and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Uni-versity of Las Palmas of Gran Canaria. He is Assistant Professorof Computer Science and Engineering at the Computer Scienceand Systems Department of the University of Las Palmas de GranCanaria. Is member of the Institute of Electrical and ElectronicEngineers IEEE , the International Association of Pattern Recog-nition (IAPR), the Asociacion Española de Reconocimiento deFormas y Analisis de Imgenes (AERFAI) and the Asociacion Es-pañola para la Inteligencia Artificial (AEPIA). His current re-search interests are in Autonomous Systems, Knowledge-BasedSystems, Active Vision, Visual Learning, Scene Analysis, Mo-bile Robotics and Interactive Robotic Systems, that is robots thatinteract with people. As well as Multimedia and e-Learning.

e-learning multimedia applications: towards an engineering of … · e-learning multimedia...

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